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CHAPTER 2

A Fresh and Liberal Construction

State Machines, Transformation Games, and Algorithms of the Interior

Well, I see it’s good to out with one’s private thoughts now and then.

Somehow, I don’t know why, a certain misty suspiciousness seems

inseparable from most of one’s private notions about some men and

some things; but once out with these misty notions, and their mere

contact with other men’s soon dissipates, or, at least, modifies them.

—Herman Melville, The Confidence-Man (1857)

Anything but a private man, the bumbling Peter Coddle is the star of a most enigmatic nineteenth-century narrative—a misty lack of information characterizes his every turn in the text. Succumbing to fatigue midway through his journey from fictitious rural Hogginsville to New York City, he returns to his carriage for some rest and recuperation: “I put my quizzing glass away, laid back in my seat, and took a good snooze, with a cup of coffee for a pillow.”¹ Alternatively, “I put my quizzing glass away, laid back in my seat, and took a good snooze, with a quart of caterpillars for a pillow.” Moreover, there is some doubt whether it was “a quart of caterpillars”; the pillow could have been “an Irishman” as well. Or “a Dutch farmer.” Or “half a dozen doughnuts.”²

These variations are not the result of printer’s error or editorial dispute over final authorial intention. They are, in fact, an integral part of the story; any one of them (and many others) might be correctly substituted. This is because Peter Coddle’s Trip to New York (1858) is both a short narrative and a self-described “Game of Transformations,” the nineteenth-century equivalent of what we today are most familiar with as Mad Libs (Figure 7).³ Using premade cards containing various article-noun combinations, players would fill in the blanks to produce readable (if absurd) sentences, creating a slightly different story every time they played. In this game, William Simonds—a Boston-area newspaperman and printer who moved into the children’s-book trade under the pseudonym “Walter Aimwell”—had produced a “Literary Puzzle” that conceived of the text as a kind of equation, with words in the place of numerical constants and syntactic blanks in the place of algebraic variables. The “misty notion” of a narrative outlined by this form was made concrete in the manifold moments of player “contact” that made up the game—literalizing the nearly systematic interplay of anxious absence and confident social contact that is equally essential to Herman Melville’s notorious “problem novel,” The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade (1857). Making no pretensions to high literary art, Simonds’s game nonetheless provides an important technical perspective on the operations and operators at the core of Melville’s text, with its patchwork of dubious characters, like undefined algorithms, “modifie[d]” by a revolving door of masquerading avatars and accompanying arguments.

Figure 7. Peter Coddle’s Trip to New York. Boston: Gould & Lincoln, 1858. Courtesy of The Strong, Rochester, New York.

Initially embedded within the youth-targeted novel Jessie; or, Trying to Be Somebody, the reading game of Peter Coddle’s Trip crystallized a functional perspective on story making and character that suffused the work, as well as the mind, of its author. William Simonds (born in 1822) took a procedural approach to nearly everything he did, informed by a consumptive immersion in the hardware of writing and publishing for most of his short life. He began his career as an apprentice at a lucrative Boston printing office, taking over as sole editor of the Boston Saturday Rambler at twenty-three. Like many upwardly mobile young men in the period, he persistently used a journal to quantify his accomplishments in year-end “Summar[ies]” that tallied the number of events attended, books read, dollars accumulated, and even, in an obsessively reflexive turn, the sum of notebook pages occupied by each of these entries.⁴ As a teenager, he invented code languages and established a set of self-governing rules that closed with the instruction to “ask [himself] each day a set of questions to be answered in writing.”⁵ Discussed at greater depth in what follows, this fill-in-the-blanks ethos was pervasive in Simonds’s professional practice, present both in his assessments of self-advancement upon taking over the Boston Saturday Rambler (“I have been looking forward to just such a situation as the one I am now to fill”) and in his draft sketches for book titles, which all follow a common form: “Ettie; _____ _____,” “Ronald; or, the Adopted Son,” “Annie _____ _____.”⁶ Though he may not have originated the mechanism that drove the story of his most enduring character, there is no doubt that he found it an incredibly useful compositional principle, weaving it deeply into the fabric of his literary labors.⁷

As the final novel Simonds would complete before succumbing to a chronic lung hemorrhage in July 1859, Jessie provokes an expansion and diversification of my argument about nineteenth-century character into less individually centered territory—into the realm of “contact” and interplay suggested by the epigraph to this chapter.⁸ Like many children’s authors of the time, Simonds frequently engaged in metanarrational play, using the congenial voice of “Aimwell” to explain answers to riddles, gesture at the physicality of the book, and generally break the fourth wall in order to address his young readers. Though such asides were hardly a rare practice in the novel genre, Simonds-as-Aimwell often pushed beyond the simple performance of conspiratorial intimacy and into moments that broke down a neat division of textual insides and readerly outsides: to “read” these books is not to lose oneself in the reading but to persistently have the threshold of inside and outside put at issue.⁹ Even beyond directly pedagogical asides in a Christian reformist mode, narrative inventions like the protagonist Jessie Hapley and the narratorial Walter Aimwell offer detailed outlines of games that can be played by readers—sometimes presented through dialogue, sometimes in letters, and sometimes via other intranarrative media stagings (Figure 8). They then demonstrate the playing of these games in ways that become part of the narrative world, as rules and speculative play scenarios unfold in tandem.